There comes a time in the creation of every website where large files need to be shared among stakeholders. This might be when the website owner is sending content for the website to the web designer, or it might be when the web designer is sending mockups back to their client. Either way, email isn’t always the best way, and you don’t always want your work-in-progress mockups on the internet for all to discover. Plus, email software will often reject emails with huge attachments, and they can be unwieldy for all involved.

If you haven’t heard of it yet, there’s a wonderful service called YouSendIt.com. They allow you to send single files up to 100MB to people, who can then download the file using a link in an email they receive from the service for free. The recipient can download using the link in the email they receive for a handful of days, and then it expires.

It’s a wonderful, easy-to-use service.

If you need to send lots of files to someone, just zip them up and use YouSendIt to send the single zip file. This is a wonderful way to not only compress the size of the transfer, but to make it easy for the recipient to work with lots of files pertaining to one project.

Your operating system may already have an easy way for you to zip up files (Mac comes with one automatically), usually by selecting multiple files in your Explorer (PC) or Finder (Mac), then right-clicking and accessing the “Archive” or “Compress” or “ZIP” function. If you don’t have a ZIP program on your PC, 7-ZIP (http://www.7-zip.org/) is a great, free program for the PC.